


not some kingless throne

by indigostohelit



Category: Narcos (TV), Narcos: Mexico (TV)
Genre: Betrayal, Bruises, F/M, Heartbreak, Reminiscing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-02
Updated: 2020-02-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:01:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22530628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indigostohelit/pseuds/indigostohelit
Summary: When she’s fucked Miguel, and kissed him, and left him sleeping and silent in the great white bed with his mouth slack and his hands curled soft against his chest, Isabella goes out to the balcony and lights a cigarette, and looks out over the pool below.It’s a cheap cigarette. She’s never developed the taste for the good ones. Besides, she kind of likes it: the bitterness, the sting in the center of her chest. All her awareness, flung out over Tijuana and the Pacific and tomorrow and the next month and the room behind her, is drawn down to her throat, her shoulders, her ribcage. The hiss of her own breathing. The taste of ashes inside her mouth.
Relationships: Isabella Bautista/Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo
Comments: 2
Kudos: 25





	not some kingless throne

**Author's Note:**

> This is unrepentant trailerfic, which I fully expect to get jossed in 11 days, but what am I gonna do, _not_ lose my mind over everything Teresa Ruiz does with her body and face? Title from the Ballroom Thieves.
> 
> For the goldfish?: I mean all of these fics are basically co-written at this point. Usual caveats: some dialogue is in English and some in Spanish but it's all "canonically" in Spanish; this is fanfiction for the text of Narcos: Mexico and is disconnected from any real persons or events. Warnings for roughly canonical levels of misogyny towards Isabella, and also discussion of the fact that Miguel knew Isabella when she was a child.

When she’s fucked Miguel, and kissed him, and left him sleeping and silent in the great white bed with his mouth slack and his hands curled soft against his chest, Isabella goes out to the balcony and lights a cigarette, and looks out over the pool below.

It’s a cheap cigarette. She’s never developed the taste for the good ones. Besides, she kind of likes it: the bitterness, the sting in the center of her chest. All her awareness, flung out over Tijuana and the Pacific and tomorrow and the next month and the room behind her, is drawn down to her throat, her shoulders, her ribcage. The hiss of her own breathing. The taste of ashes inside her mouth.

There’s a bruise coming up where her neck meets her shoulder, just above the ridge of her collarbone. She can feel it when she shifts her elbows. With her free hand she lifts two fingers and explores its edges, where the rawness fades, turns into sore skin, warm ache.

She’d guessed he might do it. She’d thought he would be—rough. Possessive, maybe. For months after he’d grabbed her arm, when she'd confronted him, it had been all she could feel. Even much later, planning this, planning how she’d make him touch her, planning how she’d—

—all she’d been able to hear was: _You’ll take what I give you._

And thought for those long months, with a cold heart and a cool head: _Maybe so; but it’ll go both ways._

It’s gone both ways. Now the night is warm and dry, and the empty pool water hushes itself against the tiling. She exhales smoke into the cool light, and taps the cigarette ash out over the balcony.

She needs to make a phone call.

The room is silent when she eases through the sliding doors, and the strange purple lamplight warm on Miguel’s face. Isabella shrugs her shirt on, over the bathing suit, and watches him breathe while she does. He’s hardly stirring. When she’d pulled herself away from him, afterwards, he hadn’t reached out, tried to hold her. She hadn’t expected him to. She’s not sure what she would have done if he had.

The Christmas she’d been nine or ten, they’d driven from Culiacán to Mexiquillo, and rented a cabin there in the lanky knob-crowned pines. That winter had been dry and cold as bone, and Isabella had woken one morning to frost in the ground and a milk-white sky, and followed her older cousins down through the trees out to where some lake or river or reservoir had lay bare and glittering beneath the paleness of the sun.

They’d huddled at the treeline, their chins tucked into their scarves, eyeing the ice as if it might spring up and bite them. After some time, one of the older boys had dared Isabella—to do what? It’s lost to her now. She only remembers how the sand had crunched and glinted under her old white sneakers, frost and discarded glass; the cold, pricking her fingers, her lips, the tips of her ears; the wide sheet of the water, mirror-clear, nearly too bright to see.

She’d put her foot delicately—so delicately!—on its surface. It had held. She could see the lake underneath, thick and green, and the curled brown fingers of the shore-weeds. There were no real shallows; the earth dropped off immediately where the water began. She slid her foot forward, just a little, and was astonished at how smoothly it went. Far behind her, one of her cousins whooped an idle insult, like a bird’s cry. She eased her other foot onto the ice, her arms wobbling, and pushed forward a little, and then a little more.

It wasn’t difficult at all. It was easier than socks on the wooden floors of her father’s dining rooms. She shoved herself in one hard motion outwards, and laughed when she sped, like a falcon, an aeroplane, something swift and free and astonishingly strong. Her cousin shouted again; she wheeled to face him, and the ice splintered underneath her, and she flung up her arms and fell without screaming.

He snatched her from the air.

It’s funny, the shape of her memories. He’s invisible, until he isn’t. Surely he must have followed them down through the forest, the beach; surely he must have stood at the treeline with her cousins, given some warning about the dare, watched her as she hesitated and thought and moved. But in her mind Miguel is absent until he’s in front of her: lifting her from the ice, pulling her back, setting her onto the sand. He’s kneeling by her on the shoreline; he’s asking her if she’s all right. And then he’s gone again, and her cousins are making her promise: tell no one, or your father won’t let us come down to see the ice again. Tell no one, Isabella, and nothing happened at all.

Who would she have told? She was a wild and selfish child, Isabella knows. Miguel had hardly existed unless he’d been speaking to her, or playing with her, or in conversation with someone she’d wanted to talk to. And then he’d left to join the police, when she was too young to understand that anyone besides herself was a human being; and when they’d met again, that night in Tijuana, he’d been so much of a human being she’d thought she would die for it. And still it had been years before the memory had sprung into her head, idly, one day in her kitchen, and she had thought at once to call him, and break that promise from so long ago. But what would she say? _Miguel Ángel, it’s funny, but do you remember—nineteen years ago, you saved my life?_

Would he even remember at all?

The telephone’s deep in the compound. Isabella watches her shadow on the wall as she walks, how it skips ahead of her body like a bad record, and slows at last to a halt by the round wooden table in the sitting room.

His hands on her hips. His face buried in her shoulder. Isabella lets her hand drift over her waist, her breast. She’s spent so long wanting him that it’s hard, even with the certainty of her body’s aches and small satisfactions, to separate that wanting from memory. Her thigh; her hip. The small of her back, where he pressed her body into his. The nape of her neck; he’s left a bruise there, too, and she hesitates before she sweeps the weight of her hair over her shoulder and bends her head forward.

She knows the number by heart. God knows she’s whispered it to herself often enough, these past weeks, in all the small frightened hours of the morning. It rings twice; she hangs up, and dials again.

The voice on the other end of the line says something, vowels broad and blunt. “Yes,” says Isabella. “He’s here.” The voice says something else, a question. “Yes,” she tells it. “I'll make sure. He’ll stay.”

The line clicks, and is dead. Isabella sets down the phone, and sits down in the armchair beside the table, and listens to her rings click against each other where her hands are shaking.

How much time does she have? An hour? Two?

She picks up the telephone and settles it in her lap, and dials again. This number she knows from habit, and from memory much older, and it picks up on the first ring. “Hello?” says the voice on the other end.

Isabella tips her head back and watches the shadows of the blinds, drifting over the high part of the wall. “It’s me,” she says.

An exhale over the line. “So,” says Amado. “It’s done.”

She should have called Benjamín. Ramón, even. She didn’t. “It’s done,” she says. “Are you ready?”

“Am _I_ ready?” says Amado, and laughs at her, disbelieving. “Your new friends might shoot you, sweetheart. Are you ready for that?”

She’s never liked Amado, precisely. There are a hundred men like him on every street corner, as far as Isabella is concerned, and most of them twice as bright. The great goodness of him has always been his loyalty; and she’s put paid to that herself. But at this moment she feels fond of him, painfully fond, like a blister against her ribs. It’s all she wants tonight: a man too slow to keep up with her.

“I don’t mean them,” she says.

She can hear him thinking. It’s some time before there’s a crackle of breath, and he says, “How long since we met? You and me, I mean.”

“Seven years,” she says. “Eight, maybe.” Eight years and four months.

“Seven years,” he says. “Do you remember—I told you I was a pilot. You made fun of me.”

She does remember, but barely. It wasn’t him she’d been looking at. “You were young,” she tells him. “We all were.”

“I was young,” he says; she can hear him smiling. “You seemed like you were about as old as Coatlicue.”

She watches the window blinds shiver. “He was young,” she says.

A long, long pause. “Yeah,” says Amado. “He was.”

“You’d just met him,” says Isabella. Her hand drifts to the bruise on her collarbone again; she presses, gentle. “A man with a dream.”

“A man with a dream?” says Amado flatly. “You want me to write a song about him? Do I sound like that kind of person?”

She pushes into her skin a little harder, and bites her lip at the pain. He isn’t a good liar, Amado. He never has been.

“He didn’t talk to you about the plan?” she says.

“Of course he did,” says Amado. “He wouldn’t shut up. You know how he was.” Isabella hums; she does. “But you think I cared? I didn’t understand any of that shit, Isabella, I just liked flying planes, I liked making some real money, it’s nothing ballads are made of. I liked—” There’s a sharp, bitten-off noise; he’s cut himself off.

“I know,” says Isabella. “I liked him too.”

She almost envies Amado his perspective: to look at Miguel and see only a man, even an extraordinary one. But she thinks of leaning next to Miguel years ago, shoulder to shoulder. _Now is our time to build an empire._ And she'd said, _Is that what we’re doing?_

Was that what they’d been doing? What else could it have been? She curls her fingers and digs her nails into the bruise, not quite hard enough to tear skin. She’d stood with him on a runway in Colombia, and felt him settle her jacket onto his shoulders, and he’d told her to ask him for a price. What else had they been doing? What other name could she give to it, that endless river of want? All the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them.

When had she first thought of kissing him? Months before Falcon, she’d been in Culiacán for a baptism, a cool wet morning in a church that had once seemed ancient to her and now seemed only small, and afterwards in a stuffy side hall filled with plastic folding chairs she’d laughed and swallowed sour wine and smiled at her uncles as if she didn’t know what they were saying about her when she turned away. And she’d spotted him across the room, the slim line of his shoulders, black and graceful, like a great cat come down from the sky and the mountains and into this little yellow room.

Had it been something special, to see him? How could it have been? She saw dozens like him at all these awful things, familiar old faces who she knew and ought to know from years gone by, and who never quite faded away like memories should. Weren’t Sinaloans meant to be rootless? However far she traveled, she seemed to carry a whole city with her; twenty-four, and already haunted. But he’d looked up, and caught her eye, and something in her had flickered up like a candle, and begun to spread.

But even then—oh, she’d wanted to fuck men before; she knew what it felt like to want someone’s hands on her, his weight over her, his breath against her neck. When she’d first thought of _kissing_ him—

“Isabella?” says Amado.

“Yes,” says Isabella. “I’m here.”

There's a pause. Amado says, “You’ll be all right?”

“Of course,” says Isabella, a little surprised. “You don’t think they will? Shoot me, I mean.”

“I don’t mean them,” he says.

Oh. She moves her hand away, quite deliberately, from the bruise.

“Yes,” she says. “I will.”

She can hear Amado hesitating. After some time, he says, “I wouldn’t be.”

It is rare for anyone to manage to really surprise her. For that she bites back the first thing on her tongue— _would you_ _rather have been the one doing it_ —and exhales, and looks at her long red nails curled in her lap.

“I’ll be fine,” she says, a little more gently. “I know. But I will.”

The room is silent, except for his breathing, and hers. She thinks about the way the lights gleamed on the runway in Colombia. She thinks about another telephone call, long ago. She thinks about, the moment before it shattered, the peace on Falcon’s face.

“You should go,” says Amado, eventually. “We’ll talk when it’s done.”

“We will,” says Isabella. “Call Benjamín for me? Tell him I told you to. Tell him it's done.”

“I will,” says Amado, and pauses. “Isabella. En el amor y en la guerra todo vale. Eh?”

“En la guerra como en el amor,” says Isabella, and presses the plastic of the telephone hard into her cheek. “Yes. It does.”

Beside the bedroom there’s a bathroom, blue-tiled and marble, the shower curtain patterned in feathers. Isabella shuts the door behind her, and steps in front of the gold-lined mirror, and meets her own eyes.

For many years now the way she puts on lipstick has been mindless. She knows what her mouth looks like. She knows what her eyes look like, and her cheekbones, and her jaw. When she’d been young, young and lonely, how exciting it had been not just to dress up, but to _dress up for;_ and then, like blood and business deals, it had become everyday, and her face had faded into something her hands were doing.

But she’d dressed up for Miguel tonight. She’s always dressed up, for Miguel.

In Colombia—even in Tijuana, with Falcon—she’d imagined it would be easy. It wasn’t only that he wanted her; plenty of men wanted her, and weren’t Miguel. It was the way he looked at her, startled and curious; the way he touched her, and didn’t touch her, as if afraid he would go up like straw. She’d tried to make him understand, in Colombia, and he’d said, _I brought you here for your contacts, Isabella—and because you’re tough—_ and she’d nearly laughed. He’d brought her because she understood him; because she understood what he was doing, what he wanted. He'd seen a different world, and for an hour, a month, a single dazzling year, she had been the only person in this world looking through his eyes. She wanted him. Weren’t those one and the same thing?

She thinks that for a long time Miguel must have been very lonely.

He’d watched her, tonight, in his swimming pool. She’d felt him watching her. She’d climbed out of the water, dripping, and shaken her hair back, and when she’d looked up to the balcony it was for a moment as it had been all those years ago in Culiacán: he stood there, a thin line of darkness, some strange predator come down to set himself against the rest of the world. She’d met his eyes, unblinking. And then she’d ducked her head, and turned away.

“Isabella?” he’d called down. “Come up here, please.”

In his bedroom she’d dried herself on one of his towels in front of him, slow and nearly theatrical. He was leaning against his desk, not even pretending his eyes were anywhere else.

“Benjamín is asking for more of a share of the profits, in Tijuana,” he said. “He wants more responsibility.”

“Is he?” said Isabella. It wasn’t hard to sound surprised. “Will you give it to him?”

He looked at her. “Should I?”

“Isn’t it your business? Whatever you like, Miguel Ángel,” she said, and watched it flash in his eyes: contempt, or relief, so close to one another that it made no difference.

Maybe it had been that simple, all along. Maybe he would have touched her two or five or eight years ago, if she had only known. Maybe he was always the man who wanted it this way.

It had been easier than she’d expected. Habit, she supposes. She knows how to smile, and be silent; she knows how to laugh at bad jokes, and swallow her tongue. She’s done it a hundred times. It’s only that tonight was the first time she’s done it with Miguel. And what is Miguel, after all? Only one man. In a list of thousands of people she’s thought little enough of to lie to, he’s only one more.

She wets a washcloth and wipes it across her face in one deliberate motion. The lipstick smears, and the cloth comes away red.

She’s better at lying than Amado is. Just not to herself.

Like in Tijuana, like in Colombia, she’d swayed into Miguel’s body, looked up at him as if she never wanted to look at anyone else. Only this time he let her; this time his arms came around her, and he bent his face to hers. He smelled sharp, like fresh laundry and starch. His face was rough. His mouth was warm.

On his bed he pushed her down. She spread her legs for him, and watched how his face changed when she did, his eyes dark, his teeth in his lower lip. “Miguel Ángel,” she said, and let him climb on top of her, let him push into her, turned her face into the pillow and collected the still small noises of pleasure her throat wanted to make and swallowed them whole.

He clutched at her shoulders. “Come on,” she whispered to him, “come on,” and he felt—her body knew how to move with him; her hands were on his waist, his chest, she looked into his face and had to look away. “Come on,” she said, again. He was filling her up, and she wanted to stop him, to turn them over and sink down onto him and watch how his eyes would go soft and hungry for her, his hands on her thighs, his tongue against his lip. She wanted to hear him say her name. She wanted to get on her knees for him, and get back up again. He was so beautiful, his mouth on her neck, on her shoulders, and her body hurt, was hurting in long, shuddering pulses. She wanted to never let him go. She wanted to do it every night for a hundred years.

She opened her eyes and watched the purple lights. Beside her, inside her, Miguel was still.

She pulled away, carefully. Miguel shifted in the bed and made a small sound; and then he sat up, and leaned over, and pressed his mouth softly to hers, and lay back down.

Had he reached for her? Had he tried to hold her against him? He hadn’t. He’d only kissed her; and when she met his eyes she knew at once that she’d never be able to say whether what in them was an apology.

She’d turned her face away, and rolled out of the bed, and gone to her purse draped over the chair and dug for her packet of cigarettes. The reflected light of the pool was glinting outside. When she glanced back, his eyes were closed, and his breathing had already begun to slow.

Ninety minutes, maybe. Thirty. The silence here is absolute; she can’t even hear cars on the road outside. She won’t hear anything, when they come. She’ll climb back into bed with Miguel, and she’ll sleep beside him; and the Americans will find her there, when they come to make their arrest. They’ll find her there, and they’ll let her go.

By the time she goes back into the bedroom her eyes are quite dry.

In the bed, Miguel is stirring, his eyelashes flickering open. “Chavela?” he says, rough.

Isabella thinks, heart in her throat, like sliding her foot out onto fresh ice: _I used to love you._

She sits on the edge of the bed. “Go back to sleep, Miguel Ángel,” she says, and bends to kiss his forehead. “I’m here.”


End file.
